Cauldron of Changes

Upon this Sea of Plasticity, Bristling with Curiosity
Setting sail Timelessly, Unfurling wings of Virtuosity

20170315

Sacred Earth Protectors Rising: Message from 13 Grandmothers

Message from the Council of 13 Indigenous Grandmothers:

"As you move through these changing times... be easy on yourself and be easy on one another. You are at the beginning of something new. You are learning a new way of being.

Instead of traveling to a goal out there, you will voyage deeper into yourself. Your mother's grandmother knew how to do this. Your ancestors from long ago knew how to do this. They knew the power of the feminine principle... and because you carry their DNA in your body, this wisdom and this way of being is within you.

Call on it. Call it up. Invite your ancestors in. As the yang based habits and the decaying institutions on our planet begin to crumble, look up. A breeze is stirring. Feel the sun on your wings."

☆ Important Message from Keeper of Sacred White Buffalo Calf Pipe ☆

I, Chief Arvol Looking Horse, of the Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota Nations, ask you to understand an Indigenous perspective on what has happened in America, what we call "Turtle Island." My words seek to unite the global community through a message from our sacred ceremonies to unite spiritually, each in our own ways of beliefs in the Creator.

We have been warned from ancient prophecies of these times we live in today, but have also been given a very important message about a solution to turn these terrible times.

To understand the depth of this message you must recognize the importance of Sacred Sites and realize the interconnectedness of what is happening today, in reflection of the continued massacres that are occurring on other lands and our own Americas.

I have been learning about these important issues since the age of 12 when I received the Sacred White Buffalo Calf Pipe Bundle and its teachings. Our people have strived to protect Sacred Sites from the beginning of time. These places have been violated for centuries and have brought us to the predicament that we are in at the global level.

Look around you. Our Mother Earth is very ill from these violations, and we are on the brink of destroying the possibility of a healthy and nurturing survival for generations to come, our children's children.

Our ancestors have been trying to protect our Sacred Site called the Sacred Black Hills in South Dakota, "Heart of Everything That Is," from continued violations. Our ancestors never saw a satellite view of this site, but now that those pictures are available, we see that it is in the shape of a heart and, when fast-forwarded, it looks like a heart pumping.

The Diné have been protecting Big Mountain, calling it the liver of the earth, and we are suffering and going to suffer more from the extraction of the coal there and the poisoning processes used in doing so.

The Aborigines have warned of the contaminating effects of global warming on the Coral Reefs, which they see as Mother Earth's blood purifier.

The indigenous people of the rainforest say that the rainforests are the lungs of the planet and need protection.

The Gwich'in Nation in Alaska has had to face oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge coastal plain, also known to the Gwich'in as "Where life begins."

The coastal plain is the birthplace of many life forms of the animal nations. The death of these animal nations will destroy indigenous nations in this territory.

As these destructive developments continue all over the world, we will witness many more extinct animal, plant, and human nations, because of mankind's misuse of power and their lack of understanding of the "balance of life."

The Indigenous people warn that these destructive developments will cause havoc globally. There are many, many more indigenous teachings and knowledge about Mother Earth's Sacred Sites, her chakras, and connections to our spirit that will surely affect our future generations.

There needs to be a fast move toward other forms of energy that are safe for all nations upon Mother Earth. We need to understand the types of minds that are continuing to destroy the spirit of our whole global community. Unless we do this, the powers of destruction will overwhelm us.

Our Ancestors foretold that water would someday be for sale. Back then this was hard to believe, since the water was so plentiful, so pure, and so full of energy, nutrition and spirit. Today we have to buy pure water, and even then the nutritional minerals have been taken out; it's just empty liquid. Someday water will be like gold, too expensive to afford.

Not everyone will have the right to drink safe water. We fail to appreciate and honor our Sacred Sites, ripping out the minerals and gifts that lay underneath them as if Mother Earth were simply a resource, instead of the source of life itself.

Attacking nations and using more resources to carry out destruction in the name of peace is not the answer! We need to understand how all these decisions affect the global nation; we will not be immune to its repercussions. Allowing continual contamination of our food and land is affecting the way we think.

A "disease of the mind" has set in world leaders and many members of our global community, with their belief that a solution of retaliation and destruction of peoples will bring peace.

In our prophecies it is told that we are now at the crossroads: Either unite spiritually as a global nation, or be faced with chaos, disasters, diseases, and tears from our relatives' eyes.

We are the only species that is destroying the source of life, meaning Mother Earth, in the name of power, mineral resources, and ownership of land. Using chemicals and methods of warfare that are doing irreversible damage, as Mother Earth is becoming tired and cannot sustain any more impacts of war.

I ask you to join me on this endeavor. Our vision is for the peoples of all continents, regardless of their beliefs in the Creator, to come together as one at their Sacred Sites to pray and meditate and commune with one another, thus promoting an energy shift to heal our Mother Earth and achieve a universal consciousness toward attaining Peace.

As each day passes, I ask all nations to begin a global effort, and remember to give thanks for the sacred food that has been gifted to us by our Mother Earth, so the nutritional energy of medicine can be guided to heal our minds and spirits.

This new millennium will usher in an age of harmony or it will bring the end of life as we know it. Starvation, war, and toxic waste have been the hallmark of the great myth of progress and development that ruled the last millennium.

To us, as caretakers of the heart of Mother Earth, falls the responsibility of turning back the powers of destruction. You yourself are the one who must decide.

You alone – and only you – can make this crucial choice, to walk in honor or to dishonor your relatives. On your decision depends the fate of the entire World.

Each of us is put here in this time and this place to personally decide the future of humankind.

Did you think the Creator would create unnecessary people in a time of such terrible danger?

Know that you yourself are essential to this world. Understand both the blessing and the burden of that. You yourself are desperately needed to save the soul of this world. Did you think you were put here for something less? In a Sacred Hoop of Life, there is no beginning and no ending.

Chief Arvol Looking Horse is the author of White Buffalo Teachings. A tireless advocate of maintaining traditional spiritual practices, Chief Looking Horse is a member of Big Foot Riders, which memorializes the massacre of Big Foot's band at Wounded Knee.

We dreamed we were far beyond John Wayne & genocide of the "frontier"but the hairy Clown demon of TV Tower has popped out of our screensinto the White white house over there next to the Pentagonas stromtroopers blast shotguns & teargas into Indian defenders

Blood mixing with oil over their weeping ancient landour last fresh water being raided with tanks & troopsindustry's old story of conquest & cruelty to "secure" big moneyonce again blowing its toxic fumes in our faces by force

America, america corporate men shed their waste on thee& hide their crimes with hazard signs from sea to oily sea at war with themselves & the Earth in her infinite magicblasting away with every old bad ammo in their money bags

20170206

Creepy Tweeter Tyrant of Trump Tower

Somehow we've been herded while broadcast media has tiptoed around the "Crime Watch" worthy criminal history of the creepy tweeter Tyrant of Trump™ Tower.Do you realize how many hundreds of millions in criminal cash have been laundered through Trump™ casinos in gambling chips alone? And that only scratches gold-plate from the surface of offshore laundering, tax-evasion, false bankruptcy, mortgage & ponzi scams, racketeering & enabling, international trafficking, & let's not leave out election hacking. Right at this moment the self-proclaimed "winning Dealer" is evading us, the American people & Congress with his most-critical tax returns. While being elevated to an un-earned Kingly position of appointing & "Ordering" all of our futures.

All you have to do is actually show the story of this self-promoting showman & his empire of giant nametags. Just grab a few cameras & begin to show us his expansive golf courses & resorts around the world, for a starter, and how he's rammed them into places like rural Scotland by terrorizing the locals. Then move on to his name-sake condos, casinos, towers. Spare no detail please. Make it a nightly obsession, a reality series, hell let's do an entire DVD set. Instead of droning along with your sheepy dribble of normalizing pseudo-news, football games & "commerce as usual."

Do you feel sorry for the "poor little mobster-child" and thus are refraining from showing us the ugliness behind the curtains? Or maybe it's how the tweet-monster points his stubby little fingers at you to show you how "puny" you are & how "huge" he is. Orwellian allegiance is not the big seller folks! Back to the camera media circus! After you get through with our golf, casino, resort & Tower tour, let's dig into to the beauty pageants (that'll be golden), the wineries, the jets, boats, offshore islands. Give it all a great, "bad dude" soundtrack. "Lifestyles of the rotten, spoiled & excessively famous"...

Let's move on to Trump™ stage magic & his mass media viralness, the tweety guy's big TV shows, his serial abuse of entire herds of self-promoting camera hounds. All of that, of course, is already on DVD, from which the Trump™ Organization continues to rake in revenues. Fast forward to the very public presidential election, which we were all force-fed for over a year, hour by hour, wearing us down to frazzle with the "Trump™ effect" & his aggressive bullying idiocy. That's just the way he is, folks, just go along.

Up to the historic, most-controversial event, only days before the actual election which would decide the entire fate of the USA & democracy under an actual Constitution... you know, the FBI Director being shuffled out by the GOP senators to make false claims about "suspicious email" which I bet you cannot even explain right now. Something about a laptop? Anthony Weiner? WTF was that thing that happened which violated the entire democratic process & decided the voter turnout being historically low (26% stayed home).

We also need to emphasize that this oligarch-in-chief is incredibly old, the oldest of them all there at 1600 Penn Street. He's older than your cranky old racist uncle who is always embarrassingly offensive at Thanksgiving. No, wait, actually that's him. So Donald, son & father of Barron von Trump, has been around for a very long time. Hanging around with very bad people, investing in risky, criminal-infested luxury & gambling economies, rubbing himself up against even the Russian KGB oligarch-in-chief, who it turns out helped him to win the big numbers game.

Now you'll be excited to feature an extra-special report, which really deserves it's own series: "America, let us introduce you to the global 'Petro-Mafia'", which coincidentally, are the very same people currently applauding & being appointed by the Trump™ Organization occupation of the White House. Also, all coincidentally tied to Putin's oily oligarchs, the Saudi Arabian kingdom, all of which Donald Trump & his associates are heavily invested in.

We pause now for a Greenpeace PSA to point out the obvious alternative to this Voldemort-slitherin oil-soaked hair-demon future. Which is to say: STOP using OIL you mother-lovers! Just #BoycottOil, & there you've purged half the world's criminal regimes. Again, coincidentally whom are all Trump Organization associates & benefactors.

And while we're all busy being obsessed with this very "special" megalomaniac con artist & his astonishing web of conflict, we'd also appreciate some web-worthy press coverage at the White House. For once can someone ask the most obvious, painful, human questions of the "reality challenged" tweeter tyrant? Like: "Sir, can you tell us what spoiled, butt-hurt childhood made you into such an unsufferable, heartless, offensive bully?" Also sir, what mobster boss taught you to abuse the ritual handshake by yanking people's arm sockets towards you to kiss your stubby fingers? Small-scale abuses in public, more than just creepy, unsportsmanly & sociopathic.

Is
this malicious mafioso jokester illegitimate? Hell fracking FBI coup
d'état yes. "Securing the homeland" our melanin-deprived a$$es. Look at
the "stand-off" of survivable realities at Standing Rock to see the
brutal "white-makes-right" oil-soaked police-state future Trump &
his pirate ship of evil-doers is attempting to ram through, before we
even know WTF is going on with this "very special" tycoon. Welcome
to the planetary apocalypse America. Native peoples have already been
here, behind the barbed wire & toxic reality-theft for generations.♨ Trudell Tribal Voices ☀ https://youtu.be/VyXdxKFBwzk

Which brings us to an essential episode of the "Trump™ story": Where in the dark realms of Voldemort did these "Trump™ folk" come from? Something about Europe of course & name changes & immigration. Because all of these loud-mouth "white identity" folks all came from somewhere outside the Americas. Likely during the unresolved Native genocide & African slavery. Tragically, in this war-choked 21st century we are imploring once again: "Resist white supremacist agendas." ("Never Again", again)

Come on, mass media, don't hold back now. Take a break from all that monster-terror-gunfight-crash-FX entertainment & "Trump supporter" KKK-country tours to actually tell us exactly who is this mysterious "bad dude" with the bad hairwho has stolen our reality.

Personal Residence Trump® Tower: Top 3 floors of Trump® Tower with approximately 30,000 square feet (3,000 m2) of space; the triplex penthouse is decorated in diamond, 24-carat gold and marble, and features an interior fountain and a massive Italianate-style painting on the ceilings. Worth as much as $50 million, it is one of the most valuable apartments in New York City. Signature Cocktail Trump® Tower "The Billionaire Martini" … $20 ☣ http://www.trumptowerny.com/bar-cocktails

We want to exist, therefore We protest. A Pussy Riot Manifesto

Nadya details the necessary steps U.S. citizens should take in order to cope with the changing political landscape, the nationalist movement, and Trump’s rise to power.

In case of political catastrophe:

1. Don’t panic.

2. Stay focused. Though don’t focus just on yourself. The question “How would I survive under a Trump presidency” is false at its core: Think about those who are the most vulnerable, who’s going to suffer from a Trump presidency the most. Find ways to help them. And then -- oh, miracle! -- you’ll notice that your own political anxiety is fading away.

3. Learn your history. Figure out what you can do; follow your plan and your social justice dream -- day by day, step by step.

4. A is for Activist: a social justice's hustler. Think beyond egocentrism -- stop asking yourself how you’re going to change the world. Hey, you can not change the world alone. But go hustle for justice anyway; make your input, your energy, an idea, an impulse. It will make a difference.

5. Be thankful for any achievement. Even if it seems small to you. Look around: You could either hate all those people and turn your life into a hell, or you could love them, and it’ll bring heaven to the earth.

6. If your government is a pile of trash - build your own guerrilla government. Build and participate and support the network of alternative institutions, organizations, initiatives. We’d better be smart and fast in creating effective alternatives in those areas where government and corporation fails: healthcare, education, media.

7. Fight for your right. Obstacles should not discourage you from action. The opposite is truth: Let obstacles motivate you.

8. Respect your mistakes. Even a total disaster could teach you some important lessons. Like: You got Trump and it royally sucks, but it may be a sign that it’s time for a radical political analysis -- it’s time to analyze systemic political diseases. It’s time to think about 1% and 99% dialectics. It’s time to question -- how it’s possible that many human beings are treated in our society as disposables; basing on class, race, sex, religion. Think about mass incarceration. Imagine for a second what does it mean -- to be released from prison and be rejected everywhere, to feel like a second-class human being.

9. Don’t sit around like the world owes you something. Give yourself to the world, be a human gift to the world -- cherish it, love it, share yourself with it. And be attentive and thankful enough to notice gifts and miracles that the world sends you back.

10. I want to exist, therefore I protest. Proclaim -- loudly -- your presence. Our scream is loud. Sometimes it suffocates us cause we run out of breath. We break our voices when we’re trying too hard. But it’s our price to pay. When you want to put something on fire, you need to burn yourself. A miracle happens just when you wish for it is so real so you could eat it for breakfast instead of eggs.

Mother-Trumping Clown-show: Out of your TV & into your Nightmares

How do you resist an enemy who’s always just kidding (while injecting their poison)?

Since November 9th, we’ve heard a lot of talk about unreality, and how what’s normal bends when you’re in a state of incipient autocracy. There’s been a lot written about gaslighting (lies that make you feel crazy) and the rise of fake news (hoaxes that displace facts), and much analysis of Trump as a reality star (an authentic phony). But what killed me last year were the jokes, because I love jokes —dirty jokes, bad jokes, rude jokes, jokes that cut through bullshit and explode pomposity.

Growing up a Jewish kid in the nineteen-seventies, in a house full of Holocaust books, giggling at Mel Brooks’s “The Producers,” I had the impression that jokes, like Woody Guthrie’s guitar, were a machine that killed fascists. Comedy might be cruel or stupid, yet, in aggregate, it was the rebel’s stance. Nazis were humorless. The fact that it was mostly men who got to tell the jokes didn’t bother me. Jokes were a superior way to tell the truth—that meant freedom for everyone.

But by 2016 the wheel had spun hard the other way: now it was the neo-fascist strongman who held the microphone and an army of anonymous dirty-joke dispensers who helped put him in office. Online, jokes were powerful accelerants for lies—a tweet was the size of a one-liner, a “dank meme” carried farther than any op-ed, and the distinction between a Nazi and someone pretending to be a Nazi for “lulz” had become a blur. Ads looked like news and so did propaganda and so did actual comedy, on both the right and the left—and every combination of the four was labelled “satire.”

In a perverse twist, Trump may even have run for President as payback for a comedy routine: Obama’s lacerating takedown of him at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner. By the campaign’s final days, the race felt driven less by policy disputes than by an ugly war of disinformation, one played for laughs. How do you fight an enemy who’s just kidding?

Obama’s act—his public revenge for Trump’s birtherism—was a sophisticated small-club act. It was dry and urbane, performed in the cerebral persona that made Obama a natural fit when he made visits to, say, Marc Maron’s podcast or Seinfeld’s “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee.” In contrast, Trump was a hot comic, a classic Howard Stern guest. He was the insult comic, the stadium act, the ratings-obsessed headliner who shouted down hecklers. His rallies boiled with rage and laughter, which were hard to tell apart. You didn’t have to think that Trump himself was funny to see this effect: I found him repulsive, and yet I could hear those comedy rhythms everywhere, from the Rodney Dangerfield “I don’t get no respect” routine to the gleeful insult-comic slams of Don Rickles (for “hockey puck,” substitute “Pocahontas”) to Andrew Dice Clay, whose lighten-up-it’s-a-joke, it’s-not-him-it’s-a-persona brand of misogyny dominated the late nineteen-eighties.

The eighties were Trump’s era, where he still seemed to live. But he was also reminiscent of the older comics who once roamed the Catskills, those dark and angry men who provided a cathartic outlet for harsh ideas that both broke and reinforced taboos, about the war between men and women, especially. Trump was that hostile-jaunty guy in the big flappy suit, with the vaudeville hair, the pursed lips, and the glare. There’s always been an audience for that guy.

Like that of any stadium comic, Trump’s brand was control. He was superficially loose, the wild man who might say anything, yet his off-the-cuff monologues were always being tweaked as he tested catchphrases (“Lock her up!”; “Build the wall!”) for crowd response. On TV and on Twitter, his jokes let him say the unspeakable and get away with it. “I will tell you this, Russia, if you’re listening—I hope you’re able to find the thirty thousand e-mails that are missing,” he told reporters in July, at the last press conference he gave before he was elected. Then he swept his fat palm back and forth, adding a kicker: “I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”

It was a classically structured joke. There was a rumor at the time that Russia had hacked the D.N.C. At the same time, Hillary Clinton’s e-mails from when she was Secretary of State —which were stored on a private server —were under scrutiny. Take two stories, then combine them: as any late-night writer knows, that’s the go-to algorithm when you’re on deadline. When asked about the remark, on Fox News, Trump said that he was being “sarcastic,” which didn’t make sense. His delivery was deadpan, maybe, but not precisely sarcastic.

But Trump went back and forth this way for months, a joker shrugging off prudes who didn’t get it. He claimed that his imitation of the disabled reporter Serge Kovaleski was a slapstick take on the reporter “grovelling because he wrote a good story.” (“Grovelling,” like “sarcastic,” felt like the wrong word.) He did it when he said that Megyn Kelly had “blood coming out of her wherever” —a joke, he insisted, and he actually meant her nose. “I like people who weren’t captured,” about John McCain: that had the shape of a joke, too.

The Big Lie is a propaganda technique: state false facts so outlandish that they must be true, because who would make up something so crazy? (“I watched in Jersey City, N.J., where thousands and thousands of people were cheering as that building was coming down.”) But a joke can be another kind of Big Lie, shrunk to look like a toy. It’s the thrill of hyperbole, of treating the extreme as normal, the shock (and the joy) of seeing the normal get violated, fast. “Buh-leeve me, buh-leeve me!” Trump said in his act, again and again.

Lying about telling the truth is part of the joke. Saying “This really happened!” creates trust, even if what the audience trusts you to do is to keep on tricking them, like a magician reassuring you that while his other jokes are tricks, this one is magic. It could be surprisingly hard to look at the phenomenon of Trump directly; the words bent, the meaning dissolved. You needed a filter. Television was Trump’s natural medium. And television had stories that reflected Trump, or predicted his rise—warped lenses that made it easier to understand the change as it was happening.

In “An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-Right,” two writers for Breitbart mapped out the alt-right movement as a patchwork of ideologies: there were “the Intellectuals,” “the Natural Conservatives,” men’s-rights types, earnest white supremacists and anti-Semites (whom the authors shrug off as a humorless minority), and then the many invisible others —the jokers, the virtual writers’ room, punching up one another’s gags. In Breitbart’s take, this was merely payback for the rigidity of identity politics. “If you spend 75 years building a pseudo-religion around anything —an ethnic group, a plaster saint, sexual chastity or the Flying Spaghetti Monster —don’t be surprised when clever 19-year-olds discover that insulting it is now the funniest fucking thing in the world,” the article states. “Because it is.”

Two thousand sixteen was the year that those inside jokes were released in the wild. Despite the breeziness of Breitbart’s description, there was in fact a global army of trolls, not unlike the ones shown on “South Park,” who were eagerly “shit-posting” on Trump’s behalf, their harassment an anonymous version of the “rat-fucking” that used to be the province of paid fixers. Like Trump’s statements, their quasi-comical memeing and name-calling was so destabilizing, flipping between serious and silly, that it warped the boundaries of discourse. “We memed a President into existence,” Chuck Johnson, a troll who had been banned from Twitter, bragged after the election. These days, he’s reportedly consulting on appointments at the White House.

Last September, Donald Trump, Jr., posted on Instagram an image of Trump’s inner circle which included a cartoon frog in a Trump wig. It was Pepe the Frog, a benign stoner-guy cartoon that had been repurposed by 4chan pranksters —they’d Photoshopped him into Nazi and Trump drag, to mess with liberals. Trump trolls put Pepe in their avatars. But then so did literal Nazis and actual white supremacists. Like many Jewish journalists, I was tweeted images in which my face was Photoshopped into a gas chamber —but perhaps those were from free-speech pranksters, eager to spark an overreaction? It had become a distinction without a difference. The joke protected the non-joke. At the event that Tila Tequila attended, the leader shouted “Heil Trump!” —but then claimed, in the Trumpian manner, that he was speaking “in a spirit of irony.” Two weeks ago, the Russian Embassy tweeted out a smirking Pepe.

I thought of that scene the first time I saw the “Access Hollywood” tape, the one that was supposed to wreck Trump’s career, but which transformed, within days, on every side, into more fodder for jokes: a chance to say “pussy” out loud at work; the “Pussy Grabs Back” shirt I wore to the polls. In the tape, Billy Bush and Trump bond like the guys at McCann Erickson, but it’s when they step out of the bus to see the actress Arianne Zucker that the real drama happens. Their voices change, go silky and sly, and suddenly you could see the problem so clearly: when you’re the subject of the joke, you can’t be in on it.

The political journalist Rebecca Traister described this phenomenon to me as “the finger trap.” You are placed loosely within the joke, which is so playful, so light —why protest? It’s only when you pull back —show that you’re hurt, or get angry, or try to argue that the joke is a lie, or, worse, deny that the joke is funny —that the joke tightens. If you object, you’re a censor. If you show pain, you’re a weakling. It’s a dynamic that goes back to the rude, rule-breaking Groucho Marx —destroyer of élites! —and Margaret Dumont, pop culture’s primal pearl-clutcher.

When Hillary described half of Trump’s followers as “deplorables,” she wasn’t wrong. But she’d walked right into the finger trap. Trump was the hot comic; Obama the cool one. Hillary had the skill to be hard-funny, too, when it was called for: she killed at the Al Smith charity dinner, in New York, while Trump bombed. It didn’t matter, though, because that was not the role she fit in the popular imagination. Trump might be thin-skinned and easily offended, a grifter C.E.O. on a literal golden throne. But Hillary matched the look and the feel of Margaret Dumont: the rich bitch, Nurse Ratched, the buzzkill, the no-fun mom, the one who shut the joke down.

When Vladimir Putin was elected President, in 2000, one of his first acts was to kill “Kukly,” a sketch puppet show that portrayed him as Little Tsaches, a sinister baby who uses a “magic TV comb” to bewitch a city. Putin threatened to wreck the channel, NTV, unless it removed the puppet. NTV refused. Within months, it was under state control. According to Newsweek, “Putin jokes quickly vanished from Russia’s television screens.”

Soon after Trump was elected, he, too, began complaining about a sketch show: “Saturday Night Live,” which portrayed him as a preening fool, Putin’s puppet. His tweets lost the shape of jokes, unless you count “not!” as a kicker. He was no longer the blue bear. Instead, he was reportedly meeting with Rupert Murdoch about who should head the FCC Soon, Trump would be able to shape deals like the AT&T and Time Warner merger, to strike back at those who made fun of him or criticized him, which often amounted to the same thing. Fox would likely be Trump TV.

Last week, at his first press conference as President-elect, Trump made no jokes. He was fuming over the BuzzFeed dossier and all those lurid allegations worthy of “South Park,” the pee jokes lighting up Twitter. Only when he reminisced about his rallies did he relax, recalling their size, the thrill of the call and response. He almost smiled.

But when CNN’s Jim Acosta tried to ask a question about Russia, Trump snapped back, furiously, “Fake news!” —and the incoming White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, told Acosta that if he tried that again he’d be thrown out. Now, it seems, is when Trump gets serious. A President pushes buttons in a different sense. As Putin once remarked to a child, “Russia’s borders don’t end anywhere” —before adding, “That’s a joke.”

2016 Was the Year of the Biggest $cam in American History

When historians look back on 2016, they should study a man with cartoonishly fake yellow hair, a penchant for lying and a ridiculous Twitter account for clues about the country’s mood. No, I’m not talking about Donald Trump: I mean Joanne the Scammer, an internet creation in a blond wig and fur coat who seems to sum up the entire absurd free-for-all that is our current moment.

Joanne is a drag character created by Branden Miller, a 25-year-old former amateur porn star from Florida. In scripted videos, tweets and Instagram posts, Joanne is shown shoplifting, falsifying her identity and using other people’s PayPal accounts to buy things — general criminal behavior carried out under a cheaply glamorous facade, a “messy bitch who lives for the drama” (in her own words). Joanne was something of a serialized meme all year as well as a spiritual leader for strange times — an ironic play on the modern self-help guru who, instead of urging us to be a better person, indulged the worst in all of us. “I don’t try to be perfect, I try to be petty,” “Lying has improved my skin complexion,” and “Who needs a man’s dick when you’ve got his bank account” were just a few of the popular mantras she posted on her Twitter, which has around 700,000 followers.

But the real source of the scam’s success in 2016 was its embrace by those at the top. Think of Brexit, which was labeled a “working-class revolt” but was led by right-wing politicians who spent their entire careers “giving more power to employers and less to workers,” according to The Guardian. The Brexit propaganda campaign vowed to redirect EU funding to the hurting National Health Service — a promise that was walked back the very morning after the vote. Mere months after its passing, the Leave vote is now regretted by as least as many voters as made up its margin of victory, as people realize they’ve been scammed.

But no one scammed harder this year than Donald Trump, who will go down as the most consequential scammer of the year and possibly in history — the scammer-in-chief, if you will. “Look at who the president can be! The fact that Donald Trump could win?” Joanne presciently told The Fader in an interview about her fellow scammer this spring. “He doesn’t even want to be president. It’s really just about popularity at this point.” Trump’s entire life has been a scam, resting on a smoke-and-mirrors identity as a capable captain of industry (his suit and tie as much a costume as Joanne’s furs) that was mostly forged through decades of fluffy publicity about how he’d do anything to make a buck. The campaign to get him elected was built on lies and promises that he could never keep but that somehow made a working man’s hero out of a Manhattanite who lives in a gilded penthouse.

Trump’s net worth is likely a scam — we don’t know if he even is a billionaire, as he says he is, because he’s declined to offer proof. Like most “reality” television, his show, The Apprentice, which made him a broadly popular figure in American households, was a scam. He didn’t write the scripts — or even come up with the iconic “You’re fired!” slogan — and the image of him as a steady, smart businessman is a calculated TV fiction, all the more a scam considering many of his actual businesses are glorified scams themselves: the for-profit Trump “University’s” false promises; the Trump casinos, temples to scamming; the Trump properties built by laborers who were scammed out of paychecks.

Like Joanne’s wig, even Trump’s uncanny hair is a scam, some embroidered mess meant to hide what’s underneath. Trump has claimed that climate change is a scam invented by the Chinese, but that ludicrous idea is the real scam, since it’s many of Trump’s supporters in the South who will be affected most by its ravages. Though Trump won the electoral college, he lost the popular vote by a historic margin, sneaking his way into the White House via some 80,000 swing voters in Rust Belt states who may or may not have been persuaded by the hacking of Hillary Clinton’s email server by the spies of another top scammer, Vladimir Putin. Most painfully, Trump built his campaign on the ultimate scam, the scam of whiteness, a fiction of genetic superiority that was originally affirmed by American slave-owners to provide biological justification for their deeds, and which has now been reignited into a sense of white victimhood, scapegoating immigrants for the economic pain of job-displacing globalization and technology.

Equally unsettling was seeing trusted institutions also scamming and being scammed. There were the political media and the polls that lulled us — and likely Hillary Clinton — into a false complacency that Trump would never win. There was the old-guard DNC, plotting behind our backs to anoint Clinton as the candidate of the Democratic Party and undermine the millennial-backed Bernie Sanders. The hacking scam against John Podesta’s email account showed, ironically, that Clinton herself was mostly scam-free — perhaps her biggest deficit in an era when only scams can get you the gold. Still, the constant stream of bad email news contributed to an unearned aura of scamminess around her campaign.

But, as Trump fans will soon discover, the scam always — always — ends in pain and empty pockets. As anyone who has been truly scammed — by Bernie Madoff, by bad mortgages, by Trump University — will tell you, the entire point of the scam is that it feels wonderful until it doesn’t. Trump has already shown his stacked deck by filling his cabinet with the same sorts of people he promised to banish. The real caper all along was that he played the part of the populist but was really just a conventional plutocrat hoping to make the rich richer and the poor poorer. The only consolation in all this mess is that the vast majority of the country is now united by the scam, and Trump voters, like all of us, might soon wake up in an America that no longer has remotely affordable health care (which poor Republicans rely on as much as poor Democrats) or even Social Security or Medicare; that still doesn’t have a wall along our Southern border but does have much more expensive consumer goods, thanks to trade wars and tariffs; that has no new manufacturing jobs here but plenty of job openings at Trump hotels in Taiwan.

And so I say this with no scorn toward Trump voters or anyone else: Scamming will only get worse in 2017, and it is probably time to bone up on your own plots and machinations to meet an administration that is incredibly prepared to fleece us for everything we’ve got. After all, there is but one cardinal rule in the art of the scam — which Joanne tweeted, and we all should have heeded, and that we’ll all need to get through the next four years and beyond: Scam today, before today scams you.

Alex Frank is a freelance writer in New York and a former editor at The FADER and Vogue.com.

☠ Boycott Trump ☣ SOS USA ☣ https://youtu.be/8okdzcz7PTM Let's be real-- even HBO wouldn't have gone along with this "billionaire uber alles" storyline. "Creepy misogynist tweeter aligns with white supremacists & Russian spies to hack the election & become President of the USA"...

Suggestion for "Executive Malware" Trump Organization USA challenge: Gather all Attorney Generals of all the States which currently have the Trump family & associates under investigation together for Trump Shadow summit, which will include NY, NJ, FL, and probably many more, to which the FBI & Justice Department are obligated to attend. http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/para/russian-organized-crime.htm

At any point in the past year, the US media could have focused on the Trump Organization's connections & economic entanglements with international organized crime, from Trump Tower to the Kremlin. Instead, the FBI director was compelled to appear before TV cameras to reveal that (gasp) some of Hillary Clinton's emails were found on a campaign aides's laptop. #WTFUSA? Now we have discovered much of the media's email obsession was a coordinated attack involving GOP operatives, Kremlin-directed hackers, Wikileaks & the Trump Organization.

20160205

Kū Kiaʻi Mauna Kea: Hawaiian Heaven vs American Empire

Defending Mauna Kea: Hawaiian Heaven v$ the American Empire

Mauna Kea needs a lawyer. Most sacred mountain of Native Hawaiian and Earth-spirit cultures, under siege by industrial developers
and military domination, seeks an educated legal representative before the World Court of opinion. And UNESCO. Also,
a PR agency would be excellent, to break the media silence in America.

The history of Hawai'i in the last century has been largely a matter of what invading and occupying interests could "get away with." Under the threat of force by the military American state, industrialist families "overthrew" the Hawaiian Kingdom and imprisoned their Queen, which allowed for a white-controlled Republic to become the 50th State of the USA. All the while land was bought and sold, military bases and bombing ranges expanded, foreign populations flooded in, and America looked the other way, embroiled in their own foreign wars of occupation.

If American media would simply show the truth of what has taken place here in the Hawaiian islands, to Native Hawaiian culture and people, the devastation of the land, hell, simply show what building a modern "telescope" on a pristine volcanic landscape looks like... the nation would rise up in shock and protest. But the don't see the bombing and destruction of Kaho'olawe, most sacred navigation beacon in the heart of the islands, they know absolutely nothing of the gigantic bombing range between the two largest and most sacred volcanoes on Earth, "Pohakuloa Training Area"... in the most endangered bird habitat in the USA.

So while Native Hawaiian leaders and cultural practitioners confront a vast governmental-industrial cultural empire seeking to build the largest telescope yet, the 13-story TMT project on their most sacred heavenly mountain, US media ignores and looks the other way to more important stories, like Donald Trump running for a Presidential election more than a year away. While the most dramatic First Nation cultural clash in recent years takes place in the most cinematic locations in "Paradise", America pretends it doesn't know anything about Hawai'i, once again.

When I say “Mauna Kea” is sacred, I do not mean to use “sacred” the
way most people use that term. I mean “sacred” not in the same sense of
worship. I use “sacred” in the sense of “precious” and “so important
that nothing else counts”—I apply it to those things and people that we
care so much about that we would do anything, even flout and break the
law, to preserve their existence.

The child of a parent, especially a young child is “sacred” in this
sense. So are parents to their children. So are grandparents. Even the
family pet is “sacred.” If your house was burning down would you risk
your life to go into the burning house to rescue your children, your
mother, your grandparents, even your beloved dog or cat? Would you go
even if forbidden by first responders, firemen or policemen? Yes, many
of us would go without hesitation–without thinking of the consequences.
Would you give a kidney to save or extend the life of your child, your
brother, your uncle? Would you spend all of your money to save a loved
one from cancer? from Lou Gehrig’s disease or from a life in prison
without parole? Yes, we all would.

Moreover, we praise such emotions and desires of others who make such
sacrifices every day. We understand the soldier who sacrifices himself
by instinctively jumping on a grenade. We understand the parent or
grandparent who gives all their money to see their child or grandchild
through college.

Whether one worships Mauna Kea or not, whether one considers it
“sacred” does not matter as much as understanding the instincts that
drive those to defend and save Mauna Kea—much as one would understand
the absolute love for a child, or a parent even if such acts break the
law.

When we see the instinct of family, of brotherhood, of sisterhood of
love for mankind in others we celebrate that—we gravitate to that. We
love and defend Mauna Kea because it reminds us what makes us human.
Sacred is not necessarily a place. It is a relationship, a deep visceral
relationship: beyond reason, beyond law, beyond rationality.

This millennium has uncovered new understandings of what has happened
in Hawai‘i. As Dr. Sai states, “In 2001, the Permanent Court of
Arbitration at The Hague, acknowledged that, ‘in the nineteenth century
the Hawaiian Kingdom existed as an independent State recognized as such
by the United States of America, the United Kingdom and various other
States.’”

However, the US continues its illegal occupation, abuse of human
rights and desecration of sacred lands. Te Wharepora hou have maintained
their stance of solidarity with native Hawaiian peoples who presently
struggle for the continued protection of Mauna a Wakea. Dr. Lee-Penehira
advises, “Protectors of Mauna a Wakea have been occupying the sacred
ancestral mountain on the island of Hawai‘i for over 100 days now, to
prevent the construction of the world’s largest telescope; the planned
Thirty Metre Telescope (TMT) project.

This is a direct attack on the
physical, spiritual and cultural integrity of the maunga and the
wellbeing of the Hawaiian People and the generations to come. Dr. Sai
and I will be joining other supporters of Mauna a Wakea in a dawn
ceremony of solidarity on Saturday morning here in Auckland.”

It is time, as Dr. Sai states, for the world to understand “the
violation of human rights and war crimes that continue to take place on a
grand scale whilst hidden under a cloak of deception and lies. These
abuses are now coming to the forefront”.

"Majority populations, cognizant of outside pressure and knowing that
they should not resort to mass murder, have turned instead to cultural
genocide as a “second best” politically determined substitute for
physical genocide."https://muse.jhu.edu/books/9780813553443

" Ethnocide means that an ethnic group is denied the right to enjoy,
develop and transmit its own culture and its own language, whether
collectively or individually. This involves an extreme form of massive
violation of human rights and, in particular, the right of ethnic groups
to respect for their cultural identity." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnocide